Back to the Ma Bell future

So when the merger of AT&T and SBC is complete — with SBC as the dominent corporation — the combined entity will take on the AT&T name.

The name change had been widely predicted ever since the merger was announced given the global recognition and reputation of AT&T as compared with SBC, a little-known brand outside the 13 states where it provides local phone service.

AT&T, which once stood for American Telephone and Telegraph, traces its roots as a company back to the 1875 invention of the telephone by founder Alexander Graham Bell. But the name did not come into being until a decade later, when it was created as the long-distance subsidiary of American Bell Telephone Company.

San Antonio-based SBC, one of the “Baby Bells” created by the 1984 breakup of AT&T’s national monopoly, was formerly named Southwestern Bell Corp.

SBC has been on a buying spree the last decade, snapping up former Baby Bells, include Ameritech, Pacific Telesis and Southern New England Telephone. So now it buys what’s left of the parent company and plans to take its name? And regulators think this is just peachy?

I am reminded of cheesy horror movies in which the monster is destroyed, blown to bits, and the heroes of the film believe they can live in peace. But as the closing credits roll, we see chunks of the beast finding each other and reconstituting . . .

Dwight Silverman | Techblogger, social media manager

5 Responses

They will now try to monopolize nextgen telecommunications – wireless, wifi, and data based communication ( including voice and video ). They don’t do that telegraph stuff unless it is reference to “telegraphing” their attempt to regain their monopoly…

Maybe they should call themselves AWW or AWWW instead of ATT – “American Wireless and WiFi” or “American Wireless, WiFi, and Web”…

And the .gov put that Bernie guy in jail, you know, the fella that broke up ATT in the first place… We don’t have that last action hero around to break up the Phoenix…

Moves like this are exactly why we’ve reached a saturation point in the broadband market. There is very little to no incentive to keep building infrastructure in many markets because there is no one to compete with.

Those who are there have to lease access from the phone company because no one else has the fiber. In the end, I think it’s the average consumer who loses in a big way.

Excerpt from “CEO Edward Whitacre talks about the AT&T Wireless acquisition and how he’s moving to keep abreast of cable competitors” over at BusinessWeek.

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it.

So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!